Jim, Doug, and others

>>... point the table will become miserably fragmented. It's at that point I would suggest that a table is a prime candidate for PACKing.

>Defragging the disk will cause the table to become contiguous and because you are not shrinking and growing the table it will remain contiguous indefinitely.

This reminds me again of something Jim N came up with:

Fragmentation doesn't have to be a bad thing. In some environment where lots of records are added it can be of significant benefit.

When the information you need from different tables or index are all within a small area on the disk, the head of the disc don't have to travel large distances on the surface. This can improve systems where the most transactions concernes the data that was added recently.


Just my 2 cents.